Page:The Recluse by W Paul Cook.djvu/23



All day long, under the dusky glare of a green sun that flamed across the sombre sky, he had been traversing a burnt and blackened waste in his quest of Loma. All day he had been crossing a dead and utterly lifeless land, and when the green sun set, he had not yet emerged from it. But even as it set, with its emerald glow it had lit darkly for a moment a forest of some sort far ahead. And toward it he went.

The night around him as the sun sank deepened from a strange twilight to a darkness, and from the darkness to an ebon blackness that crouched upon the land. But the wanderer paused not; on he travelled toward the forest, guided by the faint and unfamiliar constellations of stars that burned coldly and whitely in the sky above.

For a long tmietime [sic] he kept on through the thick darkness, ever pressing toward that forest ahead, and it was only when he had gone more than half way that the darkness lightened dimly when a huge blood-red sun swept up from the eastern sky and cast a livid, leprous glow on the land. In tremendous bounds it fled across the sky, all-surrounded by a many colored rout of streaming satellites. The air hung heavy and listless, and in the unearthly light of the red sun seemed to ooze with a myriad globules of blood. The land, burnt before, took on a desolation and an aspect of solitude as if a red rot were creeping through its rocks and sand.

The wanderer kept on, and he had almost reached the forest when the rushing red sun sank with all its satellites. But from every side, from every one of the distant horizons, there rocketed upward a horde of twisting comets, and the suffering vault became alive with jagged streaks of light hurtling erratic and aimless from horizon to horizon.

Dank and dark loomed the forest; to the right and left it stretched in never-ending line until it faded and vanished in the distant gloom. The wanderer plunged forward. In a moment he was threading his way through gigantic trees that towered up and dark. The darkness deepened and deepened as the branches of the trees interlocked more and more closely, until the entire sky was hidden from his sight, and the sullen branches formed a solid roof over his head. He picked his way in and out through the gaunt trunks that rose around him, and all the while that he moved forward they became thicker and thicker. Creepers began to make their appearance. And from every side of the black forest he heard things chuckling in the darkness; ever and again faint whisperings reached him, and sometimes he saw shadows peering from behind the boles of the trees. The still air became pregnant with a thousand sounds of sibilant whispers moaning faintly through the forest.

But he pressed onward, always before his eyes a vision of the lithe and slender loveliness of his lost Loma. And the creepers thickened and thickened until he had to claw his way through them, until, finally, he drew forth the great sword that hung at his side and hacked his way onward. And every creeper that he slashed shrieked aloud, and from the severed ends dripped a soft, warm substance. … The forest became suddenly malignant and malefic. The baleful creepers twined insidiously about his legs, and all along his path the wounded ones howled in swelling ululations that made the forest echo with waves of fiendish sound. Ever and again, thick vines clutched at him like the trailing talons of some huge and hairy arm. And when he cut them, they wailed like flayed children. … He lunged ahead faster, and the branches whipped at him. His face grew scratched and bloody from the flailings of the branches that ripped his shirt and flesh and that twined around him. He beat them off and staggered onward.

And suddenly the ground underfoot grew damp. He stopped—just in time. For in front of him, stretching until it vanished in the night ahead and on either side, lay a vast, slimy slough. The forest came down to its very edge, and even throughout it, here and